The World's Most Complicated Rube Goldberg Machine

At an annual contest for Rube Goldberg machines at Purdue University, the home team wins with a contraption that smashes the requirement to perform a simple task using at least 20 steps—by hundreds more steps, setting a new world record.

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It starts with the Big Bang, re-creates the extinction of the dinosaurs, holds a jousting competition, flips over an album, and simulates World War II, a shuttle launch, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even the alleged apocalypse in 2012. In its precisely executed review of history, "The Time Machine," a Rube Goldberg contraption built by members of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, incorporates a record-breaking 244 steps—all to water a single flower.

The machine beat the existing world record of 230 steps, achieved last year by Katsumi Takahashi and students at Michigan's Ferris State University. But that wasn't the team's objective: The goal was to win the 24th annual national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest held in March at Purdue University. Zach Umperovitch, a geology major and the team's captain, decided to count the steps in the machine the day before the competition. "We never do step counts," he says. "It just kind of happened."

The 17 students on the Purdue team first began brainstorming the colossal project last October. They knew they needed to water a plant; they just had to figure out a cool way to accomplish that. Eventually, they struck on the idea of moving through time, Umperovitch says. With this theme in mind, the team began the five-month process of building the machine's 10 separate modules.

Starting with a toy gun that fires a flag with the word "Bang" on it (Big Bang, get it?), the machine moves counterclockwise through the 10 modules, each of which explores a different era: A caveman spears a woolly mammoth during the Ice Age; a pyramid is erected in the days of Ancient Egypt; and a lunar rover circles the moon during the Cold War. "This machine has a beautiful flow," Umperovitch says. "We really tried to keep steps very visible and not hide them."

However, the point of any Rube Goldberg machine is its complexity, and that inevitably leads to problems. For example, the rocket that launches to the moon (at 1:30 in the video) is essentially a CO2 cartridge inside a rocket shell. The team was encountering difficulties getting it to shoot straight up. It not only needed a guide wire, Umperovitch says, but also required the gas cartridge to be consistently punctured in the center—essential for a vertical thrust vector. He discovered the hammer responsible for that action needed to be redesigned.

Another major issue involved electrical engineering. "The machine is not overall electronic, but the power has to run through every switch in order to keep the machine linear," Umperovitch says. "If one switch is busted, or one wire is not connected, the whole machine won't run." As a result of a glitch in that system, Umperovitch and the team's mechanical engineer spent 8 hours completely rewiring the machine two days before competition.

The simplest-looking modules, such as the flower-blossoming finale, turned out to be deceptively intricate. That step begins with a rubber duck in a water tank behind the scenes. As the duck sinks, it pulls a weight, which hits a mousetrap, which releases a pneumatic cylinder, which fires forward and pulls a string, lifting the different levels of the flower simultaneously. Conversely, the processes that seemed the most complicated were often straightforward: The pyramid is able to erect itself (40 seconds into the video) because of fishing line pulled through some washers by an electric mixer.

To make sure the machine was up to snuff, the engineers applied a hammer test: If they hit the machine with a hammer and the blow accidentally set a step off, they redesigned it. Since teams get to run their machine only three times per competition, reliability is crucial.

All the attention to detail led to a victory at the Purdue Regional Rube Goldberg Machine Contest in February, though a University of Wisconsin-Stout team defeated them at nationals. The 3500 hours of work the Purdue team poured into the project may yet yield the biggest payoff: They're waiting for confirmation of their record-breaking victory from Guinness World Records. It won't be an unprecedented achievement for the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers—they also held the world record in 2007.

Here is a close up video showing all 244 World Record Breaking linear steps.